Of all the complaints I hear about Panama bureaucracy, immigration delays top the list. No matter what an attorney tells you, you end up waiting many months longer than they told you when they took the fee to get you your residency. To be fair, it is usually not the fault of the attorney, but the fault of the government offices who are in charge of handling the paperwork. While we businessmen work diligently to get people interested to invest and to live live in Panama, it seems the government is working just as hard against these efforts by delaying what you would think to be a simple procedure.
Each new administration promises to make things easier and yet nothing seems to change except those doing the paperwork. The current administration built a new facility with new systems to the tune of over $13 million, but they are not up and running yet. Now with a new election and new administration taking over, you can be sure that chaos will reign for some time as those going out of office will try and make things difficult for those coming in, and those coming in know little or nothing about the job at hand. The challenge is that Panama does not have a civil service that is maintained from one administration to the next. Elections are usually won by promises of government jobs and that goes from top to bottom.
With all our new technology you would think that a system could be implemented that would take a great deal of paper pushing out of the process so the job could be done in a timely fashion. Maybe the new administration will come up with a better way of handling this important part of bringing in foreign investment.
Excerpt from La Prensa "Director pledges to end delays": Because of complaints about the backlog of residency applications, the National Immigration Service has announced that it will extend its workday to 15 hours in order to reduce the waiting time for requests.
The lawyers held the protest to pressure the agency to reduce the backlog, which has been a problem for years but was exacerbated when it received a flood of applications prior to changes in immigration policies that went into effect in August of last year.
Immigration received an estimated 26,000 residency applications between January 2007 and March 2009.
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